HOW TO: Dismantle a Sony Ericsson k750i and fit a new casing

Fri, 04/05/2007 - 05:06 — greg

You may have read my post about upgrading the firmware on my well used old k750i. Well that got me thinking. What else could I do to give it a new lease of life. As you can see the casing was pretty beat up. And the camera lens cover was completely missing!

So what could i do? I hit ebay and found you could buy replacement casings for less then £10. So I ordered a nice shiny red one and waited for it to be delivered. And waited, and waited, and waited. Eventually 3 weeks later it arrived. The perils of buying from China I suppose. Anyway it looked excellent, as you can see:

It came with a size 6 torx screwdriver and a case opener. Just the tools needed to dismantle the phone.

The next step was to strip down the k750i into its component pieces. Its surprisingly not difficult. First I had to use the torx driver to remove the 2 screws in the battery compartment. And the two tiny phillips head screws that held the back fascia down.

Then using the case opener I was able to pry the rear fascia away from the main housing. The trick was to start at the battery compartment end and work down each side to the top.

Once the back fascia was removed, I had a better view of what was inside.

The same process could then be repeated on the front fascia, gently prying off the casing being careful not to use too much force near the LCD display.

Now the guts of the beast are on display! Along with two more torx screws which need to be removed before we go any further.

Now the time has come to remove the keyboard unit. It actually comes off rather easily with only a little force. But if you are feeling scared you can prise the socket apart with a small screwdriver. You can see that most of the major parts simply click together using a plug and socket technique. This makes it VERY easy to dismantle and rebuild.

The LCD can now be disconnected from the main board in the same fashion.

Be careful with the LCD as it is by far the most fragile part of the phone. Its also worth giving each part a thorough clean before rebuilding, my phone was FULL of finger grime after years of use under several different members of my family.

The camera unit can now be disconnected from the main board.

Now we remove the main board. Its held in by a couple of clips on the main housing. Simply push these back with either a small screwdriver or the opening tool.

The main board removed from the body, showing the main camera unit and the speaker unit.

Now this is where it gets kind of tricky. You can pop the connection ribbon off the top of the camera.

Like so:

The camera unit just slides out, and is surprisingly compact. Next step is to gently pry out the vibration motor.

Then flip the entire unit over and GENTLY peel the camera connection ribbon and switch off the back of the housing. It is actually stuck down with glue but peels off easily once you have got a corner up.

Now we turn attention to the speaker unit. Now it the beat time to go through the main housing ant take out all the buttons. There is a very small connector by the camera shutter release button that you must not overlook. Once you have all the buttons out you can start to worry about how you are going to pry up the speaker unit. I actually went in though the button hole for the play/pause button. It allowed me to get my little screwdriver underneath it and pry it up. It could then be removed with little fuss.

The final part to be removed is the backplate/IR transmitter unit. This just needs prying up from the rear side.

Thats It! Everything is now apart. You can now rebuild the phone using the new casing and buttons. I ended up using some of the old buttons though in places as the newer ones seemed to be slightly larger and where rather stiff. Here are some shots of the finished phone.